As our heirloom blueberry cutting experiment continues (described previously here, here and here), we’ve suffered some losses. As a refresher, our goal is to pack many cuttings together in a means that can be easily separated and replanted later, while at the same time avoiding the use of rooting hormone. Lessons learned to follow. Here […]

In the previous articles in this series, we discussed the background behind our experiment in heirloom blueberry cuttings, and prepared the cuttings themselves. In this article, we expand the series by describing the box and how we used an 18-unit pressed fiber egg carton to house the cuttings. The plastic six quart box is shown […]

In the previous article, we discussed the background behind our experiment in heirloom blueberry cuttings. In this article, we expand the series by describing the cuttings. As you will recall, we accidentally cut a 7-foot shoot from a bush while we were clearing it of vines and saplings back in February. Having had a successful […]

Here at the old school, a dozen or so giant heirloom blueberry bushes line one edge of the property. These bushes produce amazing blueberries each year. We know there are at least two varieties growing here, but we are unsure of the specifics. One variety produces large, plump sweet berries, while the other is a […]

In the first article in this series, we described a small double-conversion UPS consisting of a 600 watt AC charger, two deep cycle batteries, and a 1000 watt pure sine wave inverter. In this article, we present test results obtained for a load well above, and a load well below, the applicable 20-amp-hour rating for […]

Three decades ago, we bought some glass food storage jars, and really enjoyed them. For the last decade or so, though, they’ve sat in the corner of the kitchen as little more than a decoration because the seals have dried up, cracked and allowed the food to spoil. We recently decided to 3D print some […]

Most people are familiar with the idea of an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), such as used to help keep a computer running throughout power outages. Intended for only seconds to minutes of use, long enough to get past a short power glitch, or to give the user time to save files and shut down before […]

In previous articles, we have been describing the use of LED Christmas lights as emergency off-grid lighting powered directly from a 24 volt battery array. The first article described using strings of cool white lights. Subsequent articles described building a test fixture for these and warm white lights to overcome problems with untested lights, and […]

In two previous articles, we discussed using LED Christmas lights as emergency lighting powered straight from an off-grid battery array, as well as a test fixture to sort individual lights for making a reliable DC-powered string from the random sampling of LEDs in a typical 110 volt string. Both of those articles focused on cool […]

In a previous article, we described the adaptation of LED Christmas lights as emergency solar lighting powered directly from an off-grid battery array. This approach provides many advantages versus running them from an inverter, including useful lighting while trying to fix your inverter. In that article we made some recommendations about string lengths, current and […]

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